04 November, 2016

Nicaragua faces down another deadbeat intervention

Western
media, NGOs and governments are waging a psychological warfare
campaign against the country’s Sandinista government.

by
Tortilla Con Sal

Every time
Nicaragua faces elections, this small, impoverished country is
subjected to intense scrutiny by Western governments and media.

This year’s
national elections are no exception. As in previous years, Western
media, NGOs and governments are waging a psychological warfare
campaign against the country’s Sandinista government led by
President Daniel Ortega. As usual, inaccurate criticism and
deliberate misrepresentation of the country’s electoral system
abound. But national opinion polls all forecast an overwhelming
victory for Ortega as President and for the Sandinista Front for
National Liberation, or FSLN, in the legislature. The main issue is
not whether Daniel Ortega and the FSLN will win, or by how much, but
whether some sections of the local and regional right wing, dependent
on political support from the United States, will be able to
discredit the elections’ legitimacy.

Six
political alliances and parties will contest the presidential
elections, while seven will contest the legislative elections. At the
moment over 80% of people polled say they will definitely or probably
vote. Among those voters, the FSLN as a party is polling regularly at
levels of about 60% support, the opposition parties at around 10%,
uncommitted voters at about 30%. That means Daniel Ortega, whose
personal popularity is around 79% is likely to be re-elected
President with at least 70% of the vote. The FSLN is likely to
slightly increase it’s already solid control of the country’s
National Assembly at the cost of the bitterly divided opposition
parties who long ago lost the support of their natural allies in
Nicaragua’s business classes.

The
following factors explain why President Ortega and his partner
Rosario Murillo as well as the FSLN party they lead are so popular
even after ten years in government:

Daniel
Ortega’s government has prioritized credit and technical support
for the 70 percent of Nicaragua’s labor force who work on their
own account in small businesses and the informal economy or in some
form of cooperative association, people who were marginalized under
previous neoliberal governments.

Nicaragua’s
business classes support the Sandinista government’s National
Development Plan because it has been extremely successful and
because the political opposition in Nicaragua does not have one.

Socialist
inspired public sector investment programs in infrastructure,
electrification, free health care and education, support for sport
and culture, subsidies for utilities and public transport have
tremendously enhanced quality of life for low-income families, most
of the population.

The
FSLN and President Ortega have honored their commitment to a
government of reconciliation and national unity based on dialog and
consensus with all social sectors, including, for example, the
Catholic church hierarchy, evangelical churches, labor unions and
private business.

Nicaragua’s
political opposition has been hopelessly divided ever since their
failure to win majority support in the municipal elections of 2008,
the last time they combined together against the FSLN.

Neither
Nicaragua’s political opposition nor their foreign backers have any
coherent alternative to this powerful combination of political,
economic and social factors supporting President Ortega and the FSLN.
For their part, the right wing parties legitimately contesting the
November 6th elections have avoided being cast as pawns of US policy.
The sector of Nicaragua’s political opposition worst affected by
the collapse in support for Nicaragua’s right wing generally has
been that of ex-Sandinistas allied with corruption-tainted banker and
perennial loser Eduardo Montealegre and other less well-known right
wing politicians. Now, even that tiny faction, grandiosely calling
itself the National Coalition for Democracy, has split into a group
called Citizens for Freedom and another composed of ex-Sandinistas
called the Broad Front for Democracy. These self-styled democrats
have proved they are incapable of organizing a successful political
project of their own.

Even among
themselves, they admit no dissent, and persistently blame their
failure on Daniel Ortega and their right wing rivals. Their only
political option is to appeal for outside intervention to try and
delegitimize the elections next Nov. 6. As veteran U.S. solidarity
activist Chuck Kaufman has pointed out, the ex-Sandinistas and their
equally marginal right wing allies have openly lobbied in the US to
cut off development loans to Nicaragua. The imperial US elites and
their pawns are calling into question Nicaragua’s electoral system.
They have openly proclaimed a psychological warfare campaign with the
slogan “There’s no one to vote for!” to try and invalidate this
year’s elections altogether, as they did in 2008. Back then they
falsely and unsuccessfully proclaimed that year’s municipal
elections invalid while at the same time refusing, in Managua the
capital, to accept a recount they themselves demanded.

This year
they claim the national elections are invalid because, through their
own political, legal and administrative incompetence, they lost
control of their preferred political party, the Independent Liberal
Party (PLI), to right wing rivals. They claim a lack of national and
foreign electoral observers will invalidate the result. But 5000
national observers from Nicaragua’s universities will monitor the
process, which will also be accompanied by impeccably impartial and
distinguished foreign electoral experts from across Latin America and
the Caribbean. They claim Daniel Ortega’s wife Rosario Murillo
should not be Ortega’s vice-presidential candidate, even when
opinion polls have shown Murillo’s national popularity at well over
70 percent for years now.

In any other
country, no one would pay the least attention to a tiny right wing
clique polling less than 1 percent support nationally crying fraud at
political rivals polling levels of personal approval of over 70
percent year after year. But in Nicaragua’s case all the usual
suspects are supporting this latest deadbeat political gambit by a
minuscule clique of anti-democratic, narcissistic, unpatriotic
sell-outs. US right wingers like terrorist supporters Ileana Ros
Lehtinen and Marco Rubio have pledged support. NGOs like the
Washington Office on Latin America parrot almost identical attacks on
Nicaragua’s electoral system and government. But they all struggle
maladroitly to reconcile the contradiction between massive popular
support for Daniel Ortega, Rosario Murillo and the Sandinista party
with allegations of repression and a trend towards dictatorship.

The
Organization of American States showed every sign of wanting to
support efforts to delegitimize Nicaragua’s elections. Alert to the
danger, President Ortega invited the OAS to Nicaragua to dialog on
the electoral process and related political matters. OAS General
Secretary Luis Almagro, himself flagrantly interventionist towards
Venezuela and Nicaragua, could hardly refuse without losing all
credibility. Thus, the OAS will not be observing the elections and
has been forced to acknowledge the Nicaraguan government as a partner
whose sovereignty they have to respect. The real losers in
Nicaragua’s elections will not be the almost certain to be defeated
right wing candidates, but the tiny clique of extremist
right-wingers, including many ex-Sandinistas, who hoped in vain to
engineer international dismissal of Nicaragua’s election results.